Sunday, 13 July 2014

Grave Matters

One of the many striking things my friend Anastasia noticed
when she visited Père Lachaise cemetery was that hundreds of people (or perhaps
one person hundreds of times) had left big smacking lipsticky kisses on Oscar
Wilde’s tomb, so that eventually, to protect the surface of Epstein’s great
monument, the authorities put up a glass screen.

Something similar was done in Spain to protect the tomb of
Generalissimo Franco, but there the problem was not kisses: it was the
thousands who went specifically to spit on his grave.

When Margaret Thatcher was buried some people felt her grave
to be too modestly sized — it should have been large enough to dance on.